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Microsoft and Yahoo say they now have the world's biggest IM community

Today, both Microsoft and Yahoo have made their respective instant messaging applications compatible with each other. In a joint program, Windows Live Messenger users will be able to communicate with users of Yahoo Messenger, and vice versa. Both companies have said that this is intended to create the world's largest instant messaging community, totally roughly 350 million accounts.

The rollout of new interoperable messaging clients will occur gradually however. While today marks the official day that the two IM clients will be compatible, not all users will have access to this new feature. Both Microsoft and Yahoo stated that the new service is still being tested. According to the press release:

Consumers worldwide from both Microsoft and Yahoo! will be able to take advantage of IM interoperability and join the limited public beta program. These consumers will be among the first to exchange instant messages across the free services, as well as see their friends' online presence, view personal status messages, share select emoticons, view offline messages and add new contacts from either service at no cost.(2) Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to make the interoperability between their respective IM services broadly available to consumers in the coming months.

Yahoo's communications senior vice president Brad Garlinghouse stated that "this marks a big breakthrough and an unprecedented technical achievement. We expect this to grow demand and adoption of IM globally. Interoperability between IM services has consistently topped our users' wish lists, and through the collaborative efforts between Yahoo! and Microsoft we are delighted to provide our combined global users with the ultimate IM experience."

Microsoft's vice president of the Windows Live Platform Blake Irving said "we believe this is a turning point for the IM industry." Users will be able to test out the cross-communications ability by downloading the latest versions of Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

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umm
By Burning Bridges on 7/13/2006 9:41:56 AM , Rating: 3
GAIM/Kopete/Trillian etc etc etc FTW!




RE: umm
By ksherman on 7/13/2006 9:55:40 AM , Rating: 2
whilst I agree and myself use trillian, its not exactly the same thing... If you want to talk to someone on Yahoo, you have to have a Yahoo account, vice versa and etc. What i am understanding from this "alliance" is that i could now talk to a Yahoo user if I only have a MSN account.

kudos on the merger, not that it affects me as i only use AIM, but i think it is time to drop the nonsense of have so many different IM standards


RE: umm
By OrSin on 7/13/2006 10:50:11 AM , Rating: 2
I have no idea why they did this. The only system bigger is AOL and they are dieing. It would have been better for Yahoo or MS to buy out AOL just to get thier IM then to merge in this way. My best guess is that this merger they hope will stop Google from getting in the game. I'm all for it, just dont know why they would do it now after years or trying to stay apart.


ICQ
By phatboye on 7/13/2006 5:55:15 PM , Rating: 2
Does anyone here still use ICQ?


RE: ICQ
By alex90444 on 7/13/2006 7:42:27 PM , Rating: 2
Yep. It's still most popular messenger outside US and Canada.


ALL MERGE
By Alphafox78 on 7/13/2006 10:20:47 AM , Rating: 2
Now if they all merged and there was a standard format we would be all set.




RE: ALL MERGE
By TomZ on 7/13/2006 10:33:54 AM , Rating: 1
I agree - it's too bad that someone like W3C didn't recognize a requirement for a common protocol and define it before the industry implemented all the various IM protocols. I would think that all IM systems see approximately the same set of requirements.


RE: ALL MERGE
By rrsurfer1 on 7/13/2006 10:43:04 AM , Rating: 2
QFT


RE: ALL MERGE
By pakigang on 7/14/2006 8:20:16 AM , Rating: 2
except that then it won't be free.


cool
By grimdeath on 7/13/2006 1:36:48 PM , Rating: 2
having all but one of my contacts on MSN its REALLY nice to be able to switch those one or two contacts from yahoo over. I prefer the live messenger over yahoo suprizingly, i hated the previous version of msn messenger.

*thumbs up* for making one less app to run.




RE: cool
By alex90444 on 7/13/2006 7:43:17 PM , Rating: 2
Ah.... Trillian, Miranda... ;)


hi
By 8steve8 on 7/13/2006 12:25:34 PM , Rating: 2
they are doing this to compete with aim in the US




By exchangeadviser on 7/15/2006 10:16:03 PM , Rating: 2
There is a great blog article as the what the motivating factors were for yahoo and microsoft to get together to combine forces...Great read: http://www.techcontrarian.com




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